Over the weekend you might have noticed the RSPB campaign for ‘a big wild sleep out. The Big Wild Sleep out is linked to the RSPB’s new Giving Nature a Home campaign to educate and inspire everyone to make a home for wildlife.
By staying out over the evening and into the night you can get to see your garden/local patch/reserve at a different perspective. A glimpse of the night life the creatures lead.
On Saturday evening the Phoenix group came to the reserve for the big wild sleep out event, we came for the evening to see the wildlife at a different time. Whereas usually you can hear birds in every corner of the reserve calling it was quiet and in the background noise was fixed to the tern islands, where parent birds still bring in the fish for the juveniles. Many birds will have settled down as the sun begins to disappear.
We walked around the main lake looking for different species, Just before we set off around the main lake a fox was sighted and unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to film it, but I did get a bit of recording with a hedgehog which we saw in the wildlife watch point hide, snuffling and moving along the food that had been dropped by the birds in the day. Another mammal we hoped to find was bats, the timing was right but the wind had picked up.
We ended our version of the RSPB big wild sleep out by eating marshmallows with a fire as the industry around the reserve was beginning to light up.
-Josh McGowan